Remember how we ran that story last week about Virgin Mobile laying the smackdown on manufacturer UI overlays? We liked that. But Virgin Mobile wants the Android community to know that they shouldn't consider the prepaid carrier a safe haven for illicit activities like rooting or custom ROMs - not that that's any different from all the other carriers. Here's what Virgin had to say:

"We do not endorse in any way end users using a non-officially tested operating system nor do we approve of 'rooting' devices. This constitutes a violation of our terms of service and puts our network in jeopardy," a spokesperson said.

Shortly after officially adding support for the original Galaxy S line that is now approaching its first anniversary, the CyanogenMod team set out to prove once again that it's the single greatest ROM family in the world of Android, breathing lives even into devices that are approaching retirement age.

No, it's not a shiny new Atrix or a beefy G2x (at least not yet) - this time it's the good old gramps Motorola CLIQ, also known as DEXT outside the U.S.

AC's Jerry Hildenbrand makes some very valid points about why that just doesn't quite seem right, if a bit (understandably) bitterly. As an Android lover and power user, I'm more than inclined to agree.

Intro

For the past 3 weeks, I've been rigorously testing Samsung's latest Android tablet - the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and I am happy to report that my verdict is now out. I hope you will forgive such a long review timeline, but I wanted to really dig in deep and get the full experience, all while comparing it to that of the Motorola XOOM.

I know a lot of you will jump to the Conclusion right away, but I urge you to read all the interesting sections as well - In A Nutshell, The Good, and The Not So Good at a minimum.

Looks like Verizon Wireless has taken a page out of AT&T's playbook, as the latest Gingerbread update for the Droid X now seems to detect tethering apps not approved by the carrier and cut off users' data, replacing all requests with an upsale page for the official hotspot add-on. This is now the 2nd wave of attacks against free tethering, following a global carrier block (with the exception of good old Sprint) of the most popular tethering apps on the Android Market.

In the Android world, privacy is a huge concern for most users. We've seen our fair share of malicious software, questionable apps, and out-of-place permission requests. If privacy is something that you hold near-and-dear to your heart, then we have an app for you.

This app is for rooted users only!

It's called LBE Privacy Guard, and in a way, it's quite similar to UAC (User Account Control) in Windows.

Well, that's the easy part done. The DROID X2 has been rooted, huzzah! The device was found to be vulnerable to one of the known root exploits out there (Gingerbreak) - apparently Moto couldn't be bothered to patch up the hole (the fix has been backported to 2.2 from AOSP, according to our own Justin Case.) This hasn't been fully confirmed yet, but it seems plausible, given that all previous Motorola Froyo builds have been susceptible to this exploit.

Galaxy S owners, you may have a reason for some early celebration. CyanogenMod 7 for the GS variants, which has been around in relatively unsupported early alpha stages for the last couple of months, has just gone quite a bit more formal with the introduction of the new "captivatemtd" device branch.